The incredibly mild fame conferred by being on a reality show opens a person up for so much unpleasantness and, as near as I can ascertain, being on the show itself is a bummer. I know I used to be pretty responsive when television shows wanted to cover Blue Blood. I turned down Jenny Jones and all the talk show scum who asked me to tell everyone I was, like, totally a vampire and gawth is like, oh my goth, my life. But, even when I didn’t have cable or a TV with reception, Forrest Black and I both appeared on MTV, HBO, and FOX multiple times. I don’t know if it helps sales, but, as a journalist myself, I am reluctant to refuse someone access. At least I used to be. Now I regularly turn down television show producers who tell me how much they want to give Blue Blood exposure or how they plan to present a “positive spin” on my community. I used to believe some of the promises television people made, especially when I wrote them into our appearance contracts. I used to feel like being asked to appear on a show as an expert was a compliment. In a time when people have fleeting brushes with fame for defecating on Flavor Flav’s floor . . . well, who wants to be famous?

In my article Flavor Flav Has Hot Tub Love on VH1 but Ladies Best Be Nice Girls (who like threesomes) last year, I covered Flava Flav’s apparently hypocritical casting aside of Toastee, one of his supposed suitor chicks. For those just tuning in now, another supposed contestant on the show ratted Toastee out for appearing in Barely Legal and on “VHS”. At the time, my thought was that no one needed to worry about accidentally running across VHS video these days. Also probably no prob if the naughty pictures are engraved on the walls of a cave.

Apparently, some of y’all on the interwebs still watch movies on VHS because people kept finding my article on Toastee and her rumored VHS exploits. Either that or you were just optimistically figuring that this wonderful internet invention would provide the necessary conduit to seeing Toastee naked somehow. Now there have been a few artsy bloggers posting Halloween pictures of Toastee and the like, since the show. But leave it to the mainstream video tycoons at Vivid to put out a celeb sex tape released on both DVD and a web site.

The Vivid press release, among other things, stated the following:

The 23-year-old “Toastee” was born and raised in suburban Philadelphia and was a psychology major at Northeastern University. She appeared on the VH1 show “Charm School,” vying for the affections of rap artist Flavor Flav. She was bounced from the program after it was discovered that she had done nude modeling and appeared in a porn movie under the stage name “Natalia the Scissor Vixen” known for clamping men’s heads between her thighs. She has also been a guest on The Tyra Banks Show. “Toastee Exposed” was obtained from celebrity image broker David Hans Schmitt, who says “she may not have made the grade on VH1s ‘Charm School,’ but she gets straight as on this tape.”

Although I watched Flavor of Love up until Flav kicked Toastee off, I’ve never seen Charm School. VH1 describes the show saying:

Ever wonder what became of the girls that were so nasty, vicious and rough-around-the-edges that even Flavor Flav didn’t want them? What are those girls going to do? Where are those girls going to go? Luckily for them, VH1 had just the place to send them, a little place called – CHARM SCHOOL. Thirteen of your favorite breakout stars from “Flavor of Love” seasons one and two are back for some heated competition. Living as a group, learning as a group and out for themselves, these former Flavorettes will be rigorously trained in proper etiquette and manners before competing in challenges to determine their poise and grace under pressure.

So, uhm, it was FOL2, and not Charm School, that Toastee vied for Flav’s attention on, but I guess Vivid doesn’t have to watch reality television to have good distro for a celeb sex tape. After the Toastee debacle on FOL2, I did a little internet sleuthing and it seemed to me that the mistreated contestant was probably mostly a lesbian. Her MySpace lists her orientation as bi. I didn’t mention it because I felt like whether or not Toastee set off my gaydar was not relevant. I forgot that we are living in the age of paparazzi intrusion at most levels of life. My bad. Whatever the reason for her lack of interest, Toastee aka Jennifer Toof told Ronaldo Horacio Mexico at Hip Hop site SOHH that she wanted to meet Flav and wanted to be on television but had no actual romantic interest in the rapper. Furthermore, she didn’t think anyone else on the show, except possibly New York, had a lick of real attraction to Flav as their motivation for being there.

On her MySpace blog, after being on Charm School, Toof/Toastee posted:

Well, as you guys will find out in tonight’s episode, some people are so fake, and extremely selfish. VH1 tries to create drama between people, and it’s disgusting. Why do you think I didn’t say anything about fol2? Because I have a contract, I`m not allowed to say anything. This show is just some bullshit, and when you’re in a situation thats serious, you should never trust anybody.

Now, ignoring the part where calling the show bullshit and saying VH1 instigates the drama is probably already a violation of her contract, why would she agree to be on Charm School after being booted from FOL2? She might have been contractually obligated to do so. But the more important question is perhaps, why would an attractive (and flexible!) college graduate, with a medical school acceptance letter in her pocket, put herself through all this? Twice?

If the idea is that reality show participants are supposed to be presenting something vaguely real, only they are all just tormented souls who believe they don’t exist unless they are on the small screen, how real is that? More importantly, how real is anyone’s fifteen minutes then? Am I not noticing some goal these people have? What is the point of appearing on a supposedly real show where you, not only aren’t supposed to promote your projects, but are not supposed to be yourself? At least Charm School gives the winner $50,000, instead of a shot at a mean boyfriend like FOL. I used to fantasize about crossing through my TV screen into a fabulous music video. When the TV screen has a bunch of women feigning interest in some lame hypocrite womanizer, my real life is a lot more like a cool music video these days than anything presented in broadcast media.

I used to believe that fame was something which glittered alluringly like fairy dust and not something I’d need to wipe off my shoe.

Okay, Flavor Flav is officially off my TiVo queue. For those of you who haven’t been following his post-hip-hop reality television career, here is a quick recap. Flav appeared on the TV show The Surreal Life. I’ve never seen it, but apparently they picked oddball assortments of celebs such as Vince Neil and Gary Coleman and the not-dead dude from Milli Vanilli and did stuff like send them shopping at my local grocery store. Leggy blonde bombshell Brigitte Nielsen appeared on the show the same season as Flav and they had a relationship, at least while the cameras were on, and this spawned a spin-off show called Strange Love, which I’ve only seen clips of on Flav’s newest venture Flavor of Love.

Full Disclosure here: I usually limit my reality show viewing habits to The Apprentice, but I watched the entire first season of Flavor of Love (and the first couple of America’s Next Top Model so long as I’m letting it all hang out.) The basic conceit in that eighteen or twenty chicks go to a house where Flav supposedly lives alone and lonely but for his extremely competent butler and maybe whoever drives the stretch limo SUV. They compete for his love because all he wants is to really connect with someone real. The episode where Nielsen visits shows how ludicrously more chemistry he has with her than any of the contestants. At the end of the first season, he chose the game-playing girl he supposedly hadn’t banged yet, but who had given him some non-penetrative threesome shower action. Apparently he then banged her, didn’t hit it off with her, and they parted ways, except for a contractually obligated and tepid season reunion.

The first season of the Flavor Flav-produced Flavor of Love show, I was kinda buying the story that he was looking for love in a singularly modern and peculiar way, but doing it genuinely. This season, it comes across way more like he is just a typical womanizer in love with being in love but no way willing to be with one woman in a real give and take relationship, no matter how many times he proclaims his love and deep emotional connection.

But tonight took the fucking cake. (Actually, I think the show first ran a couple days ago, but VH1 was coming through sort of static-riddled, so my TiVo only just picked it up again.) This season, Flav supposedly chose the girls himself and he has some kinda fucked up but interesting and egalitarian taste in women. So I expected to be even more entertained. Now Flav likes slutty women and clearly prefers girls who are down for getting busy with him and one or more other girls at the same time.

So he gets this one girl nicknamed Toastee and this other one nicknamed Nibblz (because they have to blur out her nipples in most shots) to curl up and spend the night with him. Toastee says she doesn’t like to share, but mentions casually to some other girls later that she got the impression Nibblz gave Flavor Flav some manual satisfaction. Now, if you took a general sampling of the female population, a decent number of them would give a member of a seminal group like Public Enemy a hand job without a lot of provocation. Narrow that sampling down to a chick competing to be his girlfriend or wife on a reality show and I kind of think less of any of them who wouldn’t take the opportunity.

So, because this is reality TV and has to have conflict above and beyond even interweb drama, Nibblz swears to the other girls that she didn’t jack Flav off and blows a total gasket and goes and tells Flav . . . wait for it . . . not that Toastee is spreading lies about their sexual canoodling . . . nope, (probably because Toastee knows a jerk-off when she hears one) instead, Nibblz tells Flav that Toastee is a pornstar and can be seen naked online on Barely Legal and on “VHS”. Who the fuck makes movies for VHS any more anyway? I mean, I have a player, but I don’t even know if it works at this point. Mind you, Nibblz has already told Flav that she has modeled nude and has a stripper pole in her living room and the implication is that her day job is dancing.

So Flav goes and asks Toastee if she specifically has done “boy/girl porn” and she says she has modeled and modeled nude, but, no way, no how has she ever done anything she would consider “boy/girl porn”. So, to cut a story longer than I intended a bit shorter, Toastee says she wants to quit the show and Flav tells her that she should stay, so long as she is telling the truth. Flavor Flav finds a solo nude shot of Toastee, tries to humiliate her by holding it up in front of all the contestants, and refuses to let her speak before leaving. He might not have personally liked that specific image. They blurred it out, so I don’t know. But he totally lied to that Toastee girl. He told her unequivocally that he would keep her on for at least another episode so long as she was telling the truth and it turned out she was telling the truth and he still booted her. If he doesn’t like wild girls who like to get naked, he needed to choose a whole different line-up of women to compete.

So, in conclusion, I generally applaud anyone with a strong and unabashed personal style. When my homeboy Lange and I met Flavor Flav in Vegas, he was gracious and pleasant. I know that a lot of what happens on reality shows is more scripted than real. But, as Flav gets top producer credit, real or scripted, I hold him responsible for presenting himself as a double standard-having, sexist liar. And, because I thought he was cool, I’m disappointed. Flavor Flav’s got problems of his own. And he needs to fix himself before he is ready for a real relationship with an honest and real, threesome-loving, fast food-eating, non-materialistic, and non-jealous woman.